The spring series of the Edict kicks off properly with our first special guest and it’s David Gerard, co-editor of the newsletter Pivot to AI. So guess what we talk about.
Yes, in this episode we talk about artificial intelligence. Specifically, we test out Google’s NotebookLM podcast creator, we discuss why the much-promoted AI utopia won’t happen, we put the idea of a robot uprising into its cultural context, and much more.
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Episode Links
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I'm most active at the moment on my blockchain blog, and on Rocknerd, my music webzine.
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It can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong
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LK-99 (from the Lee-Kim 1999 research), also called PCPOSOS, is a gray–black, polycrystalline compound, identified as a copper-doped lead?oxyapatite. A team from Korea University led by Lee Sukbae (???) and Kim Ji-Hoon (???) began studying this material as a potential superconductor starting in 1999. ? In July 2023, they published preprints claiming that it acts as a room-temperature superconductor... By mid-August 2023, the consensus was that LK-99 is not a superconductor at room temperature, and is an insulator in pure form.
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The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was a 1956 summer workshop widely considered to be the founding event of artificial intelligence as a field.
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Peter Andreas Thiel (/ti?l/; born 11 October 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. As of July 2024, Thiel had an estimated net worth of US$11.2 billion and was ranked 212th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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Pinky and the Brain is an American animated sitcom created by Tom Ruegger for the Kids' WB programming block of The WB. Pinky and The Brain are genetically enhanced laboratory mice who reside in a cage in the Acme Labs research facility. Pinky is good-natured but feeble-minded, while The Brain is highly intelligent, self-centered and scheming.
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Samuel Harris Altman (born April 22, 1985) is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the CEO of OpenAI since 2019 (he was briefly fired and reinstated in November 2023). He is also the chairman of clean energy companies Oklo Inc. and Helion Energy. Altman is considered to be one of the leading figures of the AI boom. He dropped out of Stanford University after two years and founded Loopt, a mobile social networking service, raising more than $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019.
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[21 July 2024] Worldcoin (WLD) has come under heavy criticism following a recent development, which led to talks about potential price manipulation by the team. Prominent crypto on-chain sleuth ZachXBT also reacted to these price manipulation allegations, suggesting that the Worldcoin team may actually be guilty of them.
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[23 September 2024] In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.
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[24 September 2024] Breakdown of Sam Altman’s blog post from today, enjoy!
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OpenAI founder Sam Altman has written about our fabulous future... “A few thousand days” means at least several years. This is Sam telling his backers to expect nothing checkable any time soon.
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12. In a new manifesto, OpenAI’s Sam Altman envisions an AI utopia – and reveals glaring blind spots[26 September 2024] T latest proclamation from OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, published on his personal website this week, seems remarkably hyperbolic. We are on the verge of “The Intelligence Age”, he declares, powered by a “superintelligence” that may just be a “few thousand days” away. The new era will bring “astounding triumphs”, including “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics”.
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[21 September 2024] Pennsylvania plant was site of most serious nuclear meltdown and radiation leak in US history in 1979
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The Three Mile Island accident was a partial nuclear meltdown of the Unit 2 reactor (TMI-2) of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station on the Susquehanna River in Londonderry Township, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The reactor accident began at 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979, and released radioactive gases and radioactive iodine into the environment.
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[25 September 2024] OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, has launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) system called Strawberry. It is designed not just to provide quick responses to questions, like ChatGPT, but to think or “reason”.
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Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans. —?Nick Bostrom[
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R.U.R. is a 1920 science fiction play by the Czech writer Karel ?apek. "R.U.R." stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots, a phrase that has been used as a subtitle in English versions). The play had its world premiere on 2 January 1921 in Hradec Králové; it introduced the word "robot" to the English language and to science fiction as a whole... Robots may be mistaken for humans but have no original thoughts. Though most are content to work for humans, eventually a rebellion causes the extinction of the human race.
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[11 September 2024] Our new Audio Overview feature can turn documents, slides, charts and more into engaging discussions with one click.
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[12 September 2024] Google’s NotebookLM app can now generate ‘lively’ audio discussions with two AI hosts about the documents you’ve given it.
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[2 October 2024] Google’s latest Gemini product is NotebookLM, a personal LLM information shortener. You feed it sources and it churns them into a slurry and summarizes (or shortens) them for you! NotebookLM is very keen to generate a synthetic podcast for you from the slurry. A male and a female AI voice will discuss your topic in the standard “guy ’splains at chick” format.
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[3 September 2024] Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry... [The] reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.
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AWS Professional Services: Generative Artificial Intelligence (Ai) Document Summarisation Proof of Concept Final Report, March 2024, Prepared for Australian Securities And Investments Commission (ASIC).
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Armando Giovanni Iannucci CBE (/j??nu?t?i/; born 28 November 1963) is a Scottish satirist,[1] writer, director, producer, performer and panellist.
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The Armando Iannucci Shows is a series of eight programmes directed by Armando Iannucci and written by Iannucci with Andy Riley and Kevin Cecil. It was shown on UK's Channel 4 from 30 August to 18 October 2001. Each episode focused on specific themes relating to human nature and existentialism, around which Iannucci would weave a series of surreal sketches and monologues.
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This episode was originally broadcast on Channel 4 on 13th September 2001.
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From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, TV version.
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The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (German: "Der Zauberlehrling") is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe written in 1797. The poem is a ballad in 14 stanzas. The poem begins as an old sorcerer departs his workshop, leaving his apprentice with chores to perform. Tired of fetching water by pail, the apprentice enchants a broom to do the work for him, using magic in which he is not fully trained. The floor is soon awash with water, and the apprentice realizes that he cannot stop the broom because he does not know the magic required to do so.
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[22 September 2024] Microsoft, Salesforce and Workday latest to centre their plans on ‘AI agents’ as technology advances.
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[26 September 2024] While it's hard to imagine, I want you to consider for a second that no company is invulnerable, and as I wrote last week, I have serious worries about the current state of Big Tech and the path it’s currently on.
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[26 September 2024] Code analysis firm sees no major benefits from AI dev tool when measuring key programming metrics, though others report incremental gains from coding copilots with emphasis on code review.
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Nvidia Corporation (/?n?v?di?/, en-VID-ee-?) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. It is a software and fabless company which designs and supplies graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing, as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Nvidia is also a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software.
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[26 May 2014] Is the cloud the final computing architecture, as NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson claims? Even if it's not, the winners will be the transaction and infrastructure providers.
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In September 2023, earthquake-detection equipment around the world picked up a signal that lasted nine days. A new study shows the signal was produced by a landslide into a Greenland fjord, which created a 200m-high wave that sloshed back and forth like water in a bathtub.
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[1 October 2024] Microsoft Corp. shares have lost their luster in the past few months, with some investors cooling on the artificial-intelligence trade and looking for better value elsewhere in the sector.
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[30 September 2024] AI artist Jason Allen submitted some Midjourney output, “Theatre D’Opera Spatial,” to the digital art category of the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition in 2022. He won, to some controversy.
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Théâtre D'opéra Spatial (pronounced [teat? d?pe?a spasjal], 'Space Opera Theater') is an image created by Jason Michael Allen with the generative artificial intelligence platform Midjourney. The image won the 2022 Colorado State Fair's annual fine art competition in the digital art category on August 29, becoming one of the first images made using artificial intelligence (AI) to win such a prize.
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[4 September 2022] A painting called ‘Théâtre D'opéra Spatial’ by Jason Allen has won first place at the Colorado State Fair competition, but the runners-up are particularly unhappy. Why? The winning artwork was generated by Artificial Intelligence.
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Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing chosen by Duchamp was submitted for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, to be staged at the Grand Central Palace in New York.
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K Foundation Burn a Million Quid[n 1] was a work of performance art executed and filmed on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation, an art duo consisting of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, burned £1 million (equivalent to £2.5 million in 2023) in the back of a disused boathouse on the Ardfin Estate on the Scottish island of Jura. The money represented the bulk of the K Foundation's funds that had been previously earned by Drummond and Cauty as the KLF.
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[24 March 2022] An image generated through artificial intelligence lacked the “human authorship” necessary for protection
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[8 January 2024] Many computer scientists have invented AI systems that create autonomously, but Thaler is one of the few who is comfortable using the word “sentient.” “Is DABUS an inventor? Or is he an artist?” he said. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you that. It’s more like a sentient, artificial being. But I even question the artificial part.”
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Audio file, 11m32s. Remember, a lot of this is bullshit.
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This episode it’s thanks to John August and Robert Postill for their contributions.
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CONVERSATION TOPICS: Peter Viertel, and two people who choose to remain anonymous.
THREE TRIGGER WORDS: Andrew Best, Bernard Walsh, Joanna Forbes, Joanna Forbes again, Paul Williams, Peter Lieverdink, and Rami Mandow.
ONE TRIGGER WORD: Benno Rice, Bic Smith, Dave Gaukroger, Elissa Harris, Emma Cooper, Frank Filippone, Grant Butler , Jamie Morrison, kofeyh, Mark Newton, Martin English, Michael Cowley, Mindy Johnson, Oliver Townshend, Peter Blakeley, Ric Hayman, Ross Floate, and Tom Carding
PERSONALISED VIDEO MESSAGE: One person who chooses to remain anonymous.
PERSONALISED AUDIO MESSAGE: Andrew Wright, Matthew Tayloe, Michael, and one person who chooses to remain anonymous.
FOOT SOLDIERS FOR MEDIA FREEDOM who gave a SLIGHTLY LESS BASIC TIP: Brenton Realph, Brenton Realph again, Charles Gutjahr, Craig Askings, Errol Cavit, Garth Kidd, Gavin C, James Henstridge, Lindsay, Matthew Crawford, Michael, Michael Harris, Peter McCrudden, Sam Spackman, and three people who choose to remain anonymous.
MEDIA FREEDOM CITIZENS who contributed a BASIC TIP: Wendy MsGator.
And another seven people chose to have no reward, even though some of them were the most generous of all. Thank you all so much. You know who you are.
Series Credits
- The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian via The Freesound Project.
- Edict fanfare by neonaeon, via The Freesound Project.
- Elephant Stamp theme by Joshua Mehlman.